Sad deserted shore,
Your fickle friends are leaving,
Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go,
But I will still be here,
I have no thought of leaving.
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
—Judy Collins
Gail and Paul’s geographic locator pole, including places dear to them, and their driftwood-roofed free library
YACHATS—When we arrive late Sunday afternoon, I see him in the surf. He is 40-ish, in a wet suit, out in the ocean teaching his young son to body-surf. It is a nice Father’s Day moment—and, to me, more: a reminder of the passage of time, of the cast and characters on our little dirt road, of the people who I rarely see but who are as much a part of my visits to our family’s beach house as seagulls and sand.
Back in the 1980s, when that little boy was waddling around all wet and sandy like a snickerdoodle cookie in diapers, his dad, Dave, and I would sometimes hang out on the beach as we watched our kids build dams, ride skim boards and bury themselves in the sand. Once, Dave fell asleep in the sun and awakened looking like a red snapper. I haven’t seen the man in almost a decade.
And yet here is his son, now a man himself—exactly 40 I later learn—carrying on the family beach tradition, thanks to an A-frame cabin that, like ours, remains in their family.
Our cabin dates to 1936 when my grandfather bought a small place without heat, insulation or a foundation—for $500. My mother and uncle had it rebuilt in 2005. Six generations of our family have stayed at this spot.
“Mom,” I said, “don’t you miss the old cabin, how you would have to burn a fire for 24 hours so it was warm enough so you could strip down to two sweatshirts instead of three?”
“Not in the last,” she said. “I love instant heat.”
She was both nostalgic and pragmatic. In the last few months before her death in 2020 at 93, she was obsessive about updating the contact list for people on our beach road. This was our neighborhood-away-from-home, and she thought it was important that we know each other.
“You never know when you’ll need to borrow something or someone will need to borrow something from you,” she would say.
She had been coming here since she was 9 and I’ve come here my entire life. And while I played on the beach with a handful of kids who, now grown, still come here six or seven decades later, most people on the road joined the show “already in progress.”
To my knowledge, only three households have ever been occupied by full-time residents: Dan next door, a big UCLA and Grateful Dead fan. Gail and Paul, whose house is festooned with hundreds of floats they’ve retrieved on their near-daily beach walks. And Mrs. Strake, who must have died in the 1970s.
In the 1960s, she used to invite my sister and me into her Hansel and Gretel house to roast marshmallows in a fireplace that, like our original one, was built from rocks picked up on the beach. Lenora Reynolds Strake was like something out of a Hans Christian Anderson story, kind, stooped and seemingly as old as time itself, her house so shrouded with wild crocosmias that it was hard to tell where they ended and where the house began. Her family arrived in 1883, when she was 6, meaning they had at least a century-long legacy in Yachats.
In a 1959 memoir, Mrs. Strake wrote about “Big Stump,” the tip of a redwood tree lodged in the sand between Yachats and Waldport that University of Oregon geologists carbon-dated to the time of Christ.
“My brother and I used to climb the big stump and look down inside,” she wrote. “It was hollow and filled with shells."
I imagine Mrs. Strake as a 6-year-old who in Collins’ words, probably had “no thought of leaving.” And yet there is the specter of time: that 6-year-old shuffling across the wood floor in her 80s, gnarled hands clutching a bag of marshmallows.
Her house is now owned by an artist couple from Arizona who escape the desert heat by coming here in the summer—and a few other times during the year.
ACROSS THE ROAD, Gail and Paul live year-round; other than Dan next door to us, the rest of the folks on our road are either staying in family vacation homes or rentals.
Paul is loosely known as the mayor of our road, but Gail is its inspirational soul. She not only keeps a little free library, complete with a driftwood roof, in front of their house but puts up a sign that tells you distances from here to other places, including Antioch, Calif, where she and Paul met as 12-year-olds. And, to mark the changing seasons, will put up “Happy Halloween” or “Merry Christmas” or “Welcome Spring” signs.
Mayor Paul and Gail are my ports in a storm, having saved me time and again when I needed WiFi, a printer, a drill—you name it. This has been such a pronounced pattern in my life—many people loaning me tools or fixing things I could not fix—that when Paul broke his ankle coming down the stairs at Yellowstone Lodge a few months back, it felt mildly redemptive to give him a couple of books to help ease his convalescing.
Early in the morning, when I’m up and writing, Mayor Paul and Gail will walk by headed for the beach or the 804 Trail, and I’ll come outside in my sweats to get the latest Yachats scuttlebutt. We’ve shared a couple of fish-and-chip dinners from Luna Sea in Yachats, that rare seafood restaurant with fish and chips as delicious as its satirical name.
Ours is a fairly nondescript road. The only famous person that I’ve heard once stayed here was comedian Dick Smothers, now 85, back in the 1970s or ’80s.
The next-closest we come to anything high-falutin’ is Sally and Harvey, from Jacksonville in Southern Oregon, who sometimes fly to the Newport Airport, where they keep a vehicle, and drive to their place. Sally went to school at Medford High, which Olympic high-jump champ Dick Fosbury attended, so naturally I had to get her a copy of The Wizard of Foz.
Across the way is a home owned by a couple named Mark and Nancy, who I once wrote a Register-Guard column about because, decades ago, she’d pined to be on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Mark surprised her with tickets—and made it happen.
Next door to us, for the last few years, has lived a California transplant, Dan. Between Covid-19 in 2020 and losing his wife from cancer two years later, he seemed perpetually stuck in sadness—and hadn’t cut his hair since before Covid. But on a trip to LA, Dan ran into a former high school girl friend and next time I saw him he said he was getting married. His smile returned. He lost a ton of weight. He cut his hair. Now, he breezes down the road like a kite flying on a fresh breeze.
“We’re moving up for good next week,” he says Monday as his dog Bart yanks on his leash. “We’re attending our high school reunion on Sunday and loading up the U-Haul Monday and moving.”
“Great. What high school?”
“Verdugo Hills High.”
When I ask if anyone famous attended the high school, he mentions, among others, comedian Tommie Smothers. I mention that Tommie’s brother once stayed on the road, and he’s impressed.
Then he glances to the beach. “Hey, gotta go now. Big day planned. Beach, lunch, beach.”
Because I see Dan and the others only every month or, in some cases, only every few years, this beach-people parade has a time-lapse photography nature to it. People seem to change faster than normal.
Later, when I talk to “Surfer Boy,” I asked about his parents who I remember from long ago.
“Dad had a stroke,” he said. “And Mom has Parkinson’s and is in assisted living.”
What’s more, because our paths cross so rarely, because our non-beach lives are so diverse and because different currents course through our lives, it’s hard to build strong bonds to people here. But we have our moments. On Monday night, just after sunset, Eric and his three little boys, 9, 6 and 2—all sealed tight in wet suits—body-surf so late that by the time they traipse up the steps to their cabin—9:25 p.m.—it is all but dark.
The intrepid surfers back at it the day after their late-evening splash.
The four of us honor them with a standing ovation from our front deck, me, in part, because that was exactly the kind of thing I would have done with my boys a generation ago.
In the fading light, they head for hot showers and sleep, leaving the “sad deserted shore” below, leaving the tides of time to continue their incessant comings and going, leaving me grateful for the beach road and all that it brings.
Blaine Newnham
ON SUNDAY, the iconic former sports editor and columnist of The Register-Guard, Blaine Newnham, died in Silverdale, Wash., after years of health struggles. He was 82.
When I was a freshman at the University of Oregon in the fall of 1972, Newnham, then 29, spoke at a journalism class of mine. I didn’t know what impressed me more: his obvious love for journalism or his red plaid pants.
I was among the few guys in our Bean Hall dorm complex to subscribe to the R-G, and Newnham’s column was magic. When he took a road trip with some Duck team, he made you feel you were on the plane, in the locker room, on the sidelines. When he dissected why Oregon won or lost, it was with the mysterious insight of a water diviner.
He was insightful; after a Saturday at Autzen Stadium, I couldn’t tuck away the game until I’d seen how Newnham had weighed in. He saw nuances that nobody else did.
A transplant from California, he loved the state of Oregon. From time to time, his column would take readers along on trips to the beach or cross-country skiing to the Rosarie Lakes, reminding us of what a special state ours was.
He was funny, pointed and undaunted; he often announced that a UO coach would be fired a day or two before he actually was. It’s like he new more than some of the coaches and athletic department folks knew. His sources went deep and wide.
Also, he could be deliciously cocky. Back in the pre-Phil Knight days, when the UO Athletic Department announced, in a cost-saving measure, it would no longer provide lunch for the media in the press box before football games, Newnham and his staff showed up with their own lunch. It included red wine and red-checkered tablecloths.
Finally, Newnham once rattled my cage with the best reminder I’ve ever gotten that accuracy in journalism matters. As a part-time sportswriter while attending UO, I’d misheard, over the phone, a high-jumper’s name as beginning with a “P” instead of “B.” The jumper set a new district record and his name made a 60-point headline. It said something like: “Peals breaks district HJ marks.” No, his mother pointed out, her son Joe Beals broke the record.
Blaine tacked the article on the bulletin board, circled the mistake in bold red and wrote: “If you can’t get things right, we’ll find people who can.”
It’s a lesson I never forgot. And Blaine is a journalist I’ll never forget.
Next up
ON FRIDAY, I’m leaving on an eight-day trip to Montana about which I’ll write my next two columns. Just me and my pickup. (Too many moving parts for She Who—and I get it.) I’ll play golf with a longtime friend who lives in Clarkston, Wash., and check out some spots in Montana where one of my favorite movies, A River Runs Through It, was filmed. Then, because of a reconnection that happened only this week, I plan to have dinner in Bozeman with a guy who I played baseball with at Cloverland Park in Corvallis in the summer of 1966. I was 12.
In Helena, I’ll get to buy dinner for a former colleague I worked with at The Journal-American in Bellevue, Washington, and is now department chair of communication at Carroll College. We draft pro golf teams and I’ve owed him that dinner—I think his team won the 2021 Masters—for three years.
In Helena, I also plan to say goodbye to Diane Carlson Evans, with whom I collaborated to write Healing Wounds, about the Vietnam combat nurse’s 10-year fight to honor women who served in the war. Diane is dying of cancer—and is quite open about her fate.
It was only after I scheduled the trip that I learned that Diane and novelist Kristin Hannah would be speaking at the Helena Civic Center while I’m there. Hannah wrote a novel, The Women, about a Vietnam combat nurse, a book whose informational base camp—with Diane’s permission—was our book, Healing Wounds.
The Women quickly rose to the No. 1-selling book on the planet, and Kristin’s “thanks” to Diane and me in the Acknowledgments injected new life into sales of our book.
Heart, Humor & Hope
JULY 4 WILL not only mark the 248-year anniversary of the birth of our nation but, of far less significance, the six-month anniversary of Heart, Humor & Hope. If you enjoy the column, would you consider forwarding the column to someone to show them what they’re missing or gifting them a paid subscription? Thanks for your consideration.
If you’re “just visiting” as a non-paid subscriber—this one is on the house—and wish to get each of my weekly columns—and more—you can do so by hitting the “Subscribe now” button below. It’s $50 a year or $5 a month, which work out to be less than 90 cents a column when you throw in all the bonus columns I do, including four of my Q&A columns each year.
Finally, a reminder that you can read any of the nearly 30s column I’ve written by going to your Substack app—or going to substack.com—and, after searching for “Bob Welch,” clicking on the round photo of me.
You’ll hear from me next from Montana. Meanwhile, enjoy our long-awaited sunshine and heed the words of the Irish Proverb that my Mom once did in calligraphy: “Time is so precious that it is dealt out to us only in the smallest possible fractions—a tiny moment at a time.”
Enjoy your moments.
Random comments: Love Yachats - my heart place and envy your history there. Recent lunch at Luna Sea- yes!!!! Your phrase “snickerdoodle cookie in diapers” was a mid- sentence stopper to lol. Thanks for writing about Blaine Newnam- a go-to read and a loss when he left RG...like you. I’d say you are following well in his footsteps. Finally, Judy Collins sang truth with the line “Who knows where the time goes!” Seems to be my mantra! Nostalgia is a good thing in order to touch those touchstones again. Onward
Aah. Yachats. Our go to coastal get away as we rented homes for our oregon coast time away.
Thanks for the bits of history
And...RIP Mr. Newman